I could share many, many examples of self-deception and invisible male power from my own life. My husband and I have some pretty unconventional arrangements in terms of gender roles. He does 95 percent of the cooking, and I take care of the bills. He is an extremely involved father and was so from the beginning, and we have had stretches of time during which, because of my work demands, he has spent significantly more time with our children, including not just leisure and play time but actually doing the true work of child-rearing—day care pickup, baths, dinners, schlepping them to soccer games. I have rarely felt inclined to complain about his contributions to the running of our household, and on the contrary I have often felt guilty* that I am not doing my fair share during times when my career demands are more pronounced. Even so, there are moments that reveal his relative power as a man—like when he tells me he has a meeting on Thursday night, but I ask him if he’d mind if I meet my friend for tea on Saturday morning.
My client Audrey knows that daily exercise is crucial for her well-being. She struggles with depression and anxiety that border on debilitating, and working out keeps her from going over the edge. In order to go to the gym before her husband leaves for work, she must get up at four o’clock in the morning. Already sleep-deprived from bed-sharing with a restless toddler and a nursing baby, she gets up at this ungodly hour to fit exercise into her day. When we discuss whether there might be other ways of finding time to exercise, it becomes clear that she will need to ask her husband. She will need to request that he make a change to his schedule. Though this couple faces some real financial challenges that limit their options for a less restrictive daily schedule, what concerns me is the power imbalance. Her stay-at-home-mom status positions her to need her husband’s consent and cooperation in order to fulfill her own basic needs. She organizes her daily life around his, because like any heterosexual woman, she has been socialized to accommodate her partner’s needs, readily and often without question. That kind of accommodation is not wrong or bad, except when it’s so one-sided. Reciprocity is key to equality, and reciprocity is sorely lacking in Audrey’s relationship. In a marriage with a truly equal balance of power, each partner “bends” or changes to accommodate the needs of the other at about the same rate. Unfortunately, research shows that this is not the case in a great majority of heterosexual couples.
A recent experience of Audrey’s also exemplifies gender differences in what’s been called “uncontaminated free time.” A clear finding from the most recent version* of the American Time Use Survey is that women report having less free time than men. An interesting twist from a different research study is that once upon a time (in the 1970s), leisure time reduced tension and the feeling of being rushed for both men and women, but by the year 2000, only men were getting this payoff from leisure time.22 This is because, additional research shows, women’s “free” time is far more likely to involve the presence of her children than men’s.23 Men are likely to vacate the house for the day to pursue leisure activities, leaving their children and their chore lists behind. In contrast, women are more likely to relax with a magazine and a cup of tea in the living room, risking contamination of their leisure time with requests for a PB&J, the buzzer on the dryer indicating the laundry is ready to be folded, or the words “I’m done!” being shouted from the bathroom. Audrey told me she was eagerly anticipating a weekend visit from her parents because they were going to babysit so that both she and her husband could separately pursue some desires they’d been postponing: he wanted to hike with a friend, and she wanted to spend the day shopping. Almost in passing, she mentioned that her parents were only taking her older child for the day, because the baby, of course, was still nursing. So off her husband went without any children, while her shopping excursion involved diaper changes and a baby who couldn’t be put down long enough for Audrey to try on clothes in the fitting room.
Ultimately, we determine our division-of-labor arrangements not by equality but according to whether they best serve the children’s needs and whether they make sense in light of what each partner is equipped to offer, both of which are—far more often than we realize—predicated on culturally constructed assumptions about gender roles. Our behaviors reinforce what we believe. For instance, if we believe moms are better at caring for sick children and children want their mommies when they don’t feel well, it’s Mom who will call in sick to work when their toddler has a fever. Dad will not have the chance to learn what helps his daughter rest comfortably when she’s sick, and the next time her temperature spikes, she may well say, “I want Mommy to stay home with me, not Daddy!” A father who believes women naturally know how to soothe fussy babies will pass the fussy baby over to Mom, who, if she successfully quiets the baby, will have “proven” the assumption that Mom’s got the magic touch. Rachael once told me that Scott had offered to take their kids out for the day so she could have some much-needed alone time. But because their toddler was in a cranky mood, she imagined that the three of them wouldn’t be able to have a good time while out and about, and she opted to keep the toddler home with her. Everybody but Rachael benefited from this revised plan—her husband had one fewer child to look after, her older child got some one-on-one time with his dad, and her toddler’s cranky mood was ameliorated by cuddle time with Mama. Rachael justified her decision by explaining that she would not have enjoyed her time home alone because she would’ve been too worried about her toddler’s mood, how it was hampering the outing, and whether Scott would be able to read both kids’ emotional signals as well as she could.
It’s not that Rachael’s decision was wrong, but it does qualify as self-deception, and it preserves a status quo that taxes women more than men. Even with a conscious sense of dissatisfaction about current arrangements (“I’m doing so much more than him, and I’m exhausted”), we typically try to legitimize the status quo (“But he can’t breastfeed, and the baby just cries when he tries to soothe her”). Other scholars have referred to this process as “glossing” or buying into “family myths,” a process that is almost always easier than attempting to modify the underlying mechanisms that maintain the status quo.24 In line with this, studies have shown the relationship between division of labor and relationship satisfaction to be quite complex, such that even among couples who hold egalitarian ideals, inequitable divisions of labor do not necessarily translate directly to expressed dissatisfaction.25 While we do not know for sure why that is, one theory is that we rationalize inequities in order to cope with them, telling ourselves such things as, I am more involved with the kids than he is even though we both have careers, but it’s only natural for mothers to be more attuned to their children’s needs. And the kids really prefer Mommy. As one researcher puts it, women produce babies, but having babies produces “womanly persons.”26 When we become mothers, we claim a distinct kind of maternal consciousness or maternal identity that justifies, and ultimately is cemented by, a gendered division of labor.
More Children, More Inequality
This disintegration of equality, if equality had been achieved in the first place, does not stop sometime after the first child has been assimilated into the family. Often, it erodes with each subsequent child. The greater burden on women is most pronounced when children are under six years old,27 and during those early years, as families expand, the inequity has an insidious, snowballing quality.
Just yesterday, a client soon to have her third child was describing to me her lack of faith that her partner will take time off work after the baby is born: “He says that’s his intention, but I’ll believe it when I see it.” I asked her if she had an alternate plan for getting support if her partner did, indeed, disappoint her. She told me she did not. I felt an unusual tension between us, in which my wish for her to feel supported and cared for in the immediate days after she gives birth was at odds with her insistence that such a thing was not possible. She was bitterly resigned. Her intention, it seemed, was to do it all herself, out of either spite or an inability to ima
gine any other possibilities, or both. She anticipated feeling let down by her partner, and while that anticipation is valid, given their history (he has let her down many, many times over), it was her readiness to accept that fate that concerned me. I said something to her along the lines of, “Laura, you may well be right that he isn’t going to take much time off work. There may be no avoiding feeling the disappointment of that. But I wonder, could you enlist support from others? Can you take steps to bring about a scenario in which you feel disappointed in him but also buoyed by the love and support of others?”
She had done what she could to communicate to him how important his support was. She had told him she is afraid of how depleted she will feel in the early days and weeks after this baby is born, and had made her request—that he take at least a week off work—clear. On that front, she had done all she could and really had no control over whether he was going to show up for her. But where plenty of control remained—brainstorming with me, for example, about how else she could get support, and making some phone calls to family members and friends to line up that support—she could not exercise it. My sense is that she could not even see it. Too accustomed to her disempowered state, making do with extremely limited resources, bearing alone the burden of caring for her children with minimal practical or emotional support from her partner, Laura is blind to opportunities for creating a different reality. She lives in a world of impossibility, of closed doors and dead ends.
It’s hard to talk frankly about power. In this interaction with Laura, I was hovering uncomfortably close to an invalidating stance, the place where even gentle confrontation can feel shaming and can elicit a defensive or wounded “you don’t get it” response in the other. I wanted Laura to feel seen and understood in her place of impossibility, but I also had to stand firmly on the side of possibility. After all, if I joined her in her sense that she is doomed to that disappointed, unsupported state, how would that serve her? But the very power differentials I hope to help Laura disrupt in her marriage also lurk within the therapy relationship. There are unspoken comparisons between her and me being made, and perceptions on her part that I have more resources than her. The assumption she makes when she hears me advocating for her to seek support from other people in her life is that I do not find it difficult to advocate for myself to get the support I need. She knows nothing of the conversations I have with my own therapist, who similarly urges me to consider possibilities I don’t see and who sometimes points out how, without even realizing it, I take on burdens that are not mine to bear, or refuse to ask favors from others that I would gladly do for others. The illusion of others as more competent, more immune to the struggles of motherhood, is such a compelling one.
Divided We Fall, United We Stand
I’m as hopeful as any other working mom about the latest research on men’s increased contributions to childcare and domestic responsibilities. Still, a closer look at the discrepancies that remain brings some troubling insights. Despite the choices women make about whether and when to get married, whether and when to have children, and how many children to have, the choices couples make once a baby materializes are often not choices at all. Couples find themselves entrenched in gender-stereotyped positions around the care of the baby and the home. They revert to patterns, deeply embedded within our culture, in which men have greater power. What gets negotiated between them, usually without words, are questions no less profound than whose needs matter more and whose wishes come first.
Our reactions to this imbalance are complex and varied, and do not translate neatly into obvious protest or dissatisfaction. We have many ways of distorting, denying, and justifying our unequal arrangements; as I described earlier, we can be quite adept at the legitimizing and self-deception that keep invisible male power alive and well. We may even sabotage our partners’ efforts to ease our burdens; who among us has not criticized, at least silently if not out loud, our partners’ poor diapering or dishwashing or lunch box–packing skills? Competence in the child-rearing and domestic spheres is an important and valid source of agency, power, and pride for a great many of us. And yet all these factors reinforce and maintain a status quo that ultimately erodes our well-being.
The inequities are real. They are not imagined in the minds of depleted, angry women. What looks like a choice—who will interrupt their career to stay home with the baby, who will leave work early to fetch a sick child from school, whose needs for exercise or creative pursuits or solitude will be met first—is so often not a choice, but instead a mandate driven by hidden power differentials and public policies that continue to privilege men and traditional family arrangements. Only systems-level change that remedies the inequities will bring actual choice to women attempting to balance career and family.
In the meantime, understanding that we are all in the grips of this system, men and women alike, can go a long way toward alleviating tensions and sparking change in any given marriage. Uniting with our partner against a common enemy is far preferable to viewing our partner as the enemy. As psychologist Martha McMahon states in her book Engendering Motherhood, “Whatever its complex source, men and women find themselves trapped in a pattern of gendered interaction they and their partners reproduce on a daily basis.”28 Elsewhere in both scholarly and popular literature, that “complex source” is examined more thoroughly. I’ve only scratched the surface of it here, because what I am most concerned with is what all this means for the way we feel about our partners as we navigate motherhood. The next chapter brings those feelings into clearer view.
7
Couples Adrift
Having a baby is like throwing a hand grenade into a marriage.
—Nora Ephron
On a walk one morning with a new friend whose second child is in his infancy, we spoke of the marital tensions that arise around efforts to get a baby to fall, and stay, asleep. She was describing the way her baby stirs at the slightest noise, even the cracking of her ankle as she tiptoes away from the crib after laying him down. I remembered that my husband and I used to joke about how making the transfer of a sleeping baby from arms to crib is good training for the bomb squad. Incredible agility is required; one false move, and disaster ensues.
In our conversation, my friend described a recent night in which she had managed the stealthy walk-away, with the noise machine humming and the fan set on high. Quiet as a mouse, she turned on her bedside lamp in the special way she does so that the on-off knob does not click. She silently slid under the covers and began to read her book, careful not to allow the pages, as she turned them, to brush up against the bedspread. Then her husband walked in and, though apparently not completely oblivious to the baby’s tenuous asleep status because he addressed his wife in a whisper, proceeded to turn on the bright closet light right next to their baby’s crib, switch the fan down to low, and clear his throat heartily a few times as he dropped his slippers onto the hardwood floor from a good eighteen inches above, where his feet were dangling off the end of the bed. “Are you kidding me??” she whispered to him. He looked at her blankly, genuinely unaware of what his transgression might be.
Another mother I spoke with told me about a night when her young baby was very congested. She lay awake listening to, and worrying about, his labored breathing. Her spouse, on the other hand, lay sound asleep, entirely oblivious to their baby’s sick, restless sleep and his wife’s nighttime vigil. In fact, his snoring practically obscured the sounds she strained to hear. Her rage at him was so all-consuming that she genuinely felt for a moment that she wanted to kill him.
These stories highlight how ripe for spousal tension just about any situation can become when there is a new baby in the house. My friend’s annoyance with her husband is understandable on many levels. This is not an unhappy couple, nor is her husband an uninvolved father. He is very much supportive and involved. But her world at present is organized almost completely around the baby’s needs; she is dialed in, around the clock, to his current state. It is her
husband’s lack of attunement to the delicacy of the situation, his inability to intuit that his wife was holding her breath, waiting to see if her careful, methodical strategies to get their easily awoken baby to stay asleep in those first touch-and-go moments in his crib were successful, that was an affront to her. Her disbelief that he could be so careless, as evidenced by her choice of words (“Are you kidding me??”), captures the heart of the matter in terms of the tension between them. She thinks, I can’t believe he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand my world right now. Maybe even, I am so alone in this.
This moment represents one of the greatest sources of marital discord in the transition to parenthood. My friend and her husband are inhabiting different worlds, hers with the baby in the center, and his with the baby on the periphery. While tensions arising from this different-worlds situation are highest when a baby is new, they don’t ever fully disappear. It is now ingrained in me, even though we are well beyond the napping, rocking chair, bomb-squad-training years, that any time in which my children are asleep is precious time for me, and that every effort must be made to ensure they remain asleep.* Occasionally, I wake up early in the morning before my boys do. I lie in bed fantasizing about the sublime experience of sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee and a magazine, in silence, watching the sun rise. I generate enough hope that this could actually happen that I get out of bed and gingerly, in complete darkness, make my way downstairs. I take silent, carefully executed steps on the bare wood stairs, and do a stealthy ninja lunge to avoid the creaky place in the floor right at the bottom of the stairs. By the dim glow of the pantry light, I discover that there are no ground coffee beans. I take the coffee grinder into the bathroom, wrap it in a towel to muffle the noise, close the door, and say a little prayer before turning it on. I take the kettle off the burner just before it begins to whistle. Feeling victorious, I sit down with my steaming cup of coffee, about to savor it and my solitude, when I am assaulted by the sound of what seems to be a herd of buffalo barreling down the stairs. It’s my husband. He woke up before the kids did, too (a true rarity), with apparently no sense whatsoever of the precariousness of the situation. Mere seconds later, the first child comes thumping, bleary-eyed, down the stairs, his brother following soon after.
To Have and to Hold Page 14